Social, Moral and Legal Rules, Biopolitics and the Covid-19 Crisis

Abstract The article relies on the social and legal perspective not only to better understand how norms are created and change through interactions among agents, but also to shed light on how norms are internalized in social practice. The article is organized as follows. Initially the article explores the basic assumption that deontic operators acquire their meaning via social conventions generating “personal rules” having a “mental content” which belongs to a wider “normative mind”, a mind that obviously encompasses all sorts of choices. The article then describes the different types of personal rules, distinguishing social, moral, and legal rules across the normative mind, focusing on social rules within institutions, conceived as sets of rules in equilibrium. The core of this study puts to the test the taxonomy of personal (social, moral, and legal) rules within the normative mind by exploring a situation of “dense normativity” addressed by a 2021 Lancet paper concerning findings about “tight–loose cultures” during the Covid-19 crisis, and, for the sake of explanation, focuses on one of the main normative constraints that epitomizes the challenge of the Covid-19 crisis to “tight–loose” cultures: the “wear-mask rule”. These observations can be extended to other normative constraints of that crisis, but in essence they parse the interplay between the different types of personal rules, which not only are social, but also moral and legal, drawing conclusions that complement the findings of the Lancet paper with some critical observations. The article critically concludes with remarks about the co-existence of different normative systems of personal rules in a context of biopolitics and suggests that individual morality appears to be the core of normativity to address collective threats such as those caused by the Covid-19 crisis.